Mid-Week Links: Plans from On High

Plan Bay Area

• Pacific Sun has a wonderful rundown, as they so often do, of the issues surrounding One Bay Area and Plan Bay Area - from the workshops disrupted by tea party agitators to historical context to just what the plan actually hopes to achieve.
• One Bay Area has cut job and housing growth projections for Marin, with significant housing cuts in some towns and dramatic increases in others.  Town planners will be consulted for the next draft figures, to be released in May. (IJ)
• However, Supervisor Judy Arnold, Marin's alternate representative to ABAG,  called Plan Bay Area's projected job increase in Marin unrealistic, citing a shrinking, rather than growing, job pool in the county. County staff will examine the numbers, and a decision will then be made whether to proceed with an appeal. (IJ)

Marin County

• The Downtown San Rafael BID will get a $250,000 cash infusion for advertising and events after Keep It Local San Rafael settled their lawsuit against Target and Cal-Pox. (IJ)
• San Anselmo is still tied in knots as it tries to tighten design review ordinances.  Neighbors are still upset over the addition to Councilmember Kroot's home. (Ross Valley Reporter)
• Joe Casalnuevo, who successfully challenged county ordinances over whether split lots needed to pay in-lieu affordable housing fees, has taken Marin to court over the fight, alleging $60,000 in damages and time lost fighting the fee. (IJ)
• MCBC is taking volunteers for its annual Bike Locally Challenge, though at six months it may be a bit long for a promotion.  Arlington County, VA, does a month-long Car Free Diet that involves bikes and transit - perhaps Marin Transit could cross-promote? (Pacific Sun, County of Arlington)
• Copyright law overrode local preference in Tiburon, where the council approved CVS's red sign, overturning the Design Review Board's ruling that it should be a gray and white sign. (IJ)
• And...: Fairfax will at last install cameras for town council meetings. (IJ) ... Ross Valley School District residents will vote on a $149 parcel tax in June to help stave off a budget crisis in the district. (Patch) ... Marin Transit tweaks Novato and Terra Linda bus routes. (IJ) ... Joseph Eichler designed more than just tract homes. (Bay Citizen)

The Greater Marin

• While the focus of California High Speed Rail has been on just about everything but its utility, Central Valley cities are clamoring for the infrastructure. (LA Times, Fresno Bee)
• Midcoast San Mateo is struggling with Plan Bay Area, which is including a county-designated Priority Development Area in the rural region.  Regional officials insist the rural development area is about improving infrastructure, not housing development. (San Mateo County Times)
• Transit signage in the Bay Area are poor, and that's actually no surprise at all.  Though MTC is on it, it's unlikely Marin will see much of the fruit of their labor given our county's current transit state of affairs. (Transportation Nation)
• More people took public transit in 2011 than in 2010, the most since 1957, and that bodes well for the future of transportation and our cities. (New York Times)

ABAG Options that Work

Corte Madera’s departure from ABAG won’t solve any of their problems – indeed, it will compound them.  Despite the town’s protestations that housing mandates are imposed upon them by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats that don’t understand the town, the fact remains that by quitting ABAG they have simply gone from an organization where they had a say to a state housing department where they have no say.

If Corte Madera were serious about regaining local control over whether it will build any housing or not, it would look for ways to work within the system while seeking its reform.  In their ill-informed haste, Corte Madera left behind two important tools in the ABAG toolbox: forming a subregion, and allocation trades.

Shrink the fish pond

A subregion is a group of governments assigned their state housing needs as a block, and the subregion may then divvy up the allocations between members as they see fit.  This gives local governments significantly more control over planning decisions as staff is necessarily closer to the ground and even the smallest minnow of a town has a greater voice in a smaller fish pond.

An effective Marin subregion would need to involve the whole of the county's towns and cities.  Policy decisions, such as factors for the allocation methodology, would be decided by either the county’s ABAG delegation or the Marin County Council of Mayors and Councilmembers, consisting of all 60 of Marin’s elected councilmembers and supervisors.  Either way gives the process legitimacy, something ABAG is sorely lacking, and allows the public to be more involved decisionmaking.

Napa took advantage of the subregional option this RHNA cycle, forming a subregion for precisely the reasons of local control and to address local concerns.  Their draft methodology will likely include factors such as water availability and traffic, both serious concerns in Marin as well, and will involve significant negotiations between individual jurisdictions.

Alas, the time to form a subregion has passed.  Protests against this last RHNA cycle focused on the state’s supposed usurpation of local control and the deleterious effects thereof and so never got around to more productive lines of thought like forming a subregion.  Even if Marin were to establish a subregion tomorrow, the upcoming RHNA cycle would not take the subregion into account.  This process requires patience, and the blinkered opponents of RHNA are motivated by righteous anger, not calculated political moves.

Trading spaces

Luckily, ABAG allows localities who find their allocations particularly onerous to trade away some of their housing allocations, so long as a jurisdiction doesn't entirely abdicate its responsibility for new housing, compensates the receiving jurisdiction for the burden, and maintains the overall mix of affordable housing. ABAG must approve the transfer, but is not required to under state law - the Southern California Area Governments, ABAG's SoCal counterpart, does not require review, for example, though it does require the jurisdictions to be contiguous.

While there weren't any trades based on taste last cycle, as there would be if Corte Madera involved, Mountain View did transfer some of its allocation to Santa Clara County for practical reasons.  Moffett Field was projected to add jobs, but the town had no jurisdiction over the facility, which was in unincorporated county land, and protested that it was responsible for what amounted to federal workforce housing.  Santa Clara, as the proper jurisdiction over Moffett Field, agreed to take over responsibility for the allocated units.

It's unclear whether Corte Madera could be part of such trades while outside ABAG, as it would be the only jurisdiction in the Bay Area not part of the association.  Rather, as a jurisdiction receiving its allocation directly from the state it would likely be obligated to zone for the whole batch.  Town staff are preparing a report on what happens now that Corte Madera has left ABAG, which should shine more light on that issue.

Either option – forming a subregion, or initiating trades – requires political leadership that can reach across jurisdictional lines and convince those who want to work within the system.  It requires patience, and faith in the system, to lead reform, yet by acting so recklessly and counterproductively Corte Madera has shown it cannot be that leader.  Unless Marin finds such a leader, opponents of regionalism will continue to burn the only bridges they have back to local control.

A Lesson in Overreaction

There’s an old saying: “Think local, act global.”  It’s a pithy reminder that everything we do, from our brand of toilet paper to how we structure our cities, effects everyone else. I think someone forgot to tell Corte Madera that.

This past Tuesday, Corte Madera voted to quit ABAG, effective July, 2013.  The Council voted out of frustration at housing mandates it says are killing the town’s character, out of anger at Plan Bay Area, and out of a belief that Corte Madera is perfect.  Yet its actions will have no effect on any of the issues at stake in this debate and will hinder the town’s capacity to shape those issues.

Corte Madera will still need to zone for more housing.  Although ABAG is the administrator of housing requirements for this region, the mandate to zone comes from the state government.  By leaving ABAG, Corte Madera will receive its mandates directly from Sacramento, exposing it to the whim of a truly unelected and unaccountable body.  Within ABAG, Corte Madera had a voice in the association’s General Assembly.  It could contest mandates, allocation formulae, assumptions, and more.  Although staff has a major role to play in governments across the region, at least ABAG staff worked for local elected officials and were answerable to them.

Beyond ABAG, Corte Madera is still a part of the other three regional organizations – Metropolitan Transportation Commission, Bay Area Air Quality Management District, and the Bay Coastal Development Commission – which are all working on Plan Bay Area.  Indeed, Corte Madera will be materially affected by decisions made by these agencies but will lack any voice at the proceedings, as it has no representative on any of their boards.

If Corte Madera is subject to SB375, it will need to work directly with staff at each of those regional agencies to formulate its greenhouse gas reduction plans, using up valuable regional and town staff time simply to duplicate efforts and wasting taxpayer money to do so.

Not that any of this will matter for a while.  Although details are a bit sketchy, it seems as though Corte Madera will still be subject to ABAG mandates for the upcoming housing needs allocation.  If you listened to media reports you’d never know it, but there will be no material difference to Corte Madera as a result of these actions.  The town will still be subject to Plan Bay Area and will still receive housing allocations from ABAG until the following allocation in 2020.

The straw that broke this camel’s back were preliminary draft growth projections being used in Plan Bay Area's discussion phase.  They were too high, a problem brought up with force at Tuesday’s council meeting, but ABAG heard the voice of the town and others and will revise its numbers significantly downward in the next draft.  Those original numbers were released with no methodology, another complaint of Corte Maderans, but ABAG will release its second draft methodology this month.  Housing allocation numbers for the next cycle haven’t even been drafted yet, but they were brought up time and again as though the town already knew it would need to zone for hundreds of new units.  These are fake problems ginned up by Corte Madera’s ABAG representative, Councilmember Carla Condon, who should be fighting within the system rather than railing against it.

So what did Corte Madera get with its resolution on Tuesday?  Headlines, extra costs, and a muted voice.  Corte Madera will still receive housing allocations from ABAG in 2013 and the state in 2020, it will still be subject to Plan Bay Area, it will still be under regional organizations, but it has forfeited its voice in any of these decisions and has thrust upon its staff state-mandated planning requirements currently performed by ABAG.  The council gets to look like a hero to the county’s paper progressives, but its petulant overreaction to nonexistent problems will only compound the town’s woes.

Mid-Week Links: This Part Hurts

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/36750762 w=620&h=349] This is a rather long presentation, but it lays out the essence of how car traffic hurts culture, hurts neighborhoods, and what to do about it.  I've been to talks like this in DC but this is the first time I can really share one with you.  And if you work in transportation or the planner's office, this ought to count as continuing education, so bust out the earphones and popcorn.

Marin County

• Former Supervisor Hal Brown died this week of cancer, and the respect Ross Valley and Marin had for him was evident in editorials and memoria. (Pacific Sun)
• Mill Valley urbanists, attention!  Have a say in the direction of your town and join one of the Mill Valley 2040 committees charged with drafting the new general plan.  Applications are due March 14, so get on it. (IJ, Town of Mill Valley)
• San Anselmo urbanists can have a bit of their own fun, too, as this Saturday the town council will weigh resident priorities for the next 2-5 years at a special meeting from 10am-12pm.  After the meeting, a survey will be put online for people who could not make it. (Patch)
• SPAWN, a nonprofit whose goal is to restrict construction near creeks had its own San Geronimo demonstration home red-tagged by the county for building without a permit next to a creek. Neighbors that had run afoul of the group in the past were furious at the hypocrisy. (IJ)
• There may still be some useful Q&A to be had with Fairfax Councilmember David Weinsoff, who happens to be Fairfax's delegate to ABAG, though the discussion may have descended into Agenda 21/CittaSlow madness. (Patch)
• Untangling the affordable housing mess caused by redevelopment agencies' abrupt closure on February 1 will take quite a while to untangle, but surely the State Legislature can handle it, right? (Pacific Sun)
• Marin is the least affordable place to live in the Bay Area, if one adds the cost of transportation to the cost of housing.  A new study shows that Marinites spend an average of 56.3% of their income on housing and transportation, compared to the 39.5% San Franciscans spend. (Chronicle)

And...: Sausalito repaves a street that hasn't seen work in 70 years. (IJ) ... San Rafael's plastic bag ban chugs along despite a threatened lawsuit by plastics makers. (Patch) ... Stand Up for Neighborly Novato will merge with Novato Housing Coalition so as to better focus their efforts to promote affordable housing in the city. (IJ)

The Greater Marin

• Arlington County, Virginia, has a number of bikes in its vehicle fleet, saving them money on gas, car maintenance, and also on employee health benefits and sick days.  How might Marin's communities utilize bicycles in their vehicle fleets?  (Patch)
• SimCity 5 announced, and the shouts of urbanists around the world rose as one. (Stop and Move)
• Amtrak wants to restrict the number of bikes allowed on Capital Corridor trains, as around 10% of riders now bring their own bicycle and it's becoming a nuisance to non-bikers.  Amtrak ought to strongly encourage bicycling, however, as active living and bicycling culture tends to go hand-in-hand with rail ridership. (Sacramento Bee)
• Since the ban on cell phones while driving went into effect in California, traffic deaths have dropped an astounding 22%, the largest drop since CHP started keeping records. (Mercury News via IJ)

Bikeshare Could Roll in Marin

This week TAM released a Request for Proposal allocating $25,000 to study whether Marin is suitable for a bikeshare system, and where it should go. If Marin eventually does develop its own system, it will join Montreal, London, Paris, New York, Minneapolis, and many other cities in implementing such a system.   The RFP itself is not terribly interesting, though you can read it if you like.  It's also not terribly intriguing that TAM is investigating bikeshare, as the authority has a history of investigating a wide variety of projects, no matter the project's feasibility.  What is intriguing is that this comes as the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) is preparing to launch a bikeshare system with San Francisco, San Jose, Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Redwood City; as SMART is under construction; as the Plan Bay Area gets into full swing; and as a bikemaggeddon is preparing to land in Sausalito with the America's Cup.  Each of these could push bikeshare to the front of Marin's mind and make it likely the system will actually be built.

What the devil is bikeshare?

The first successful system in the United States was Washington, DC's Capital Bikeshare, or CaBi for short, and it's been replicated across the country since its rollout in 2010.  Subscriptions are fairly cheap: $7 for a day, $15 for a week, $25 for a month, and $75 for a year.  A subscriber takes a bike out of a station and can dock the bike at any other station.  The trip is free for the first 30 minutes but there's a fee if the bike is out for longer.  Although it starts fairly nominal, the fee increases quite a bit once a trip goes longer than an hour.  The point is to get the bikes circulating, to replace single trips that might be too short for transit or too long on foot.  DC's tourists use the system all the time, and it's quite common to see families riding along the National Mall atop the striking red bikes.

DC's residents, including me, use the system all the time.  Riding a bike in the city is just as fast as using a car and, for short trips, faster than taking the subway.  It keeps me active, pays for itself after a month's use, is flexible and efficient.  It reintroduced me to bicycling and opened the city in a way the bus and metro never had.  Now neighboring cities are clamoring to join the CaBi system, while neighborhoods in DC are constantly fighting for new stations.

Not to say that CaBi doesn't have problems.  Bikeshare depends on users circulating the bikes around from station to station.  Nothing's worse than finding an empty bikeshare station when you want a bike or a full station when you need to park (you can get your time extended if the station is full).  Stations, therefore, need to be tightly packed so that if one station is empty or full, the next one isn't too distant.  In Paris, the stations are sometimes no more than a block apart and don't dissipate into the suburbs - there's a hard boundary.  In DC, the stations are rather further spaced apart, which works reasonably well though being "dock-blocked", as its known, still happens with maddening frequency.  The city contracts with a company to manually move bikes from full stations to empty ones, but it's not quite enough.  A more decentralized city would mean less strain on certain stations as people commute, but barring that more stations, bikes, and members would go a long way to improving circulation around the system.

The Bay Area's plan

BAAQMD is spearheading the San Francisco plan to establish a bikeshare system in the northeastern quadrant of the city and in isolated pockets along the Caltrain corridor.  Its centerpiece is the downtown San Francisco segment, centered around Market Street, which will include 500 bikes at 50 stations spaced 300 yards apart.  It's set to open this summer, just in time for the America's Cup, which will bring a flood of tourists to the city - tourists that will undoubtedly flock to bikeshare.

The District argues that bicycles can function as an extension of the transit network, but transporting them on regional transit agencies is discouraged.  Bicycles are not allowed on BART during commute hours, and are limited on Caltrain.  The Warm Planet bike shop at Caltrain's Fourth & King depot is over capacity, and transit is largely maxed out around Market during the commute.  Marinites face similar problems on GGT's commuter buses and ferries.  Having a bike ready for anyone in the commercial heart of the city (not to mention the other commercial hubs along Caltrain) will give commuters a solution, allowing them to easily transfer to bicycles in the city without the need to fret over getting a bike to and from work.  A bikeshare system would also free a commuter to bike to work but not from it, or vice versa, if they don't want to arrive at either end a little sweaty.  This encourages more bicycle use, more transit use, and, therefore, less driving.

Eyeballing Marin's Bikeshare Suitability

Marin's central and southern cities are ideally suited to the bicycle.  Commercial districts are close to one another and housing, meaning most residents are well within biking distance of at least one downtown.  Bikes are also better suited than the bus to traverse sprawling Novato or Terra Linda and can be a car replacement for most trips elsewhere.

Yet Marin is not terribly dense and has fairly mediocre bicycle infrastructure.  More than almost any other place, Marin is linear, with valleys branching off the 101 corridor.  The ideal grid, with its redundancies and infinite rerouting, is impossible over Marin's ridges.  This isolates communities to their benefit and detriment, and makes cycling more difficult than it is in DC's suburbs - it's fairly difficult to ride from Fairfax to Lucas Valley despite the fact that it's only as far as downtown San Rafael, as the crow flies.  Marin is also incredibly car-centric, rendering some of the county's major thoroughfares entirely inhospitable to bikes or pedestrians.

Marin's employment corridor is Highway 101.  Though office and retail exist in the downtowns tucked away from the freeway, the highest density of employment is along that central spine.  Those that don't work along the corridor probably work in San Francisco, also down the corridor.

Bikeshare needs strong bicycling infrastructure, to ensure there is a good way to ride from place to place; population density to keep the system running throughout the day; and decentralized commute patterns to ensure certain areas don't get overloaded as everyone goes to them, or denuded as everyone leaves them.  At first blush, Marin misses all three of these criteria, but it's not enough to convince me Marin is unsuitable to bikeshare.  Those well-spread downtowns lend themselves to bicycling, and other systems, like CaBi, have had success in areas similar to ours.

I also want bikeshare to succeed in Marin.  Beyond the health, environmental, cost, and traffic benefits, bikeshare would reap political benefits for the county's urban cycling infrastructure.  Transportation debates in the county are dominated by the driver's voice, as most Marinites are drivers first and cyclists second.  Bicycle improvements, then, play second fiddle to parking, roads, and other projects that maintain or strengthen our reliance on the automobile.  When bicycling does enter the debate, focus is often on its recreational aspects rather than its functionality as everyday transportation.  Since bikeshare is unabashedly functional, growing its membership means growing the political base advocating for cycling improvements.

I'm excited to see what TAM's study will show - Marin could reap so many rewards with the system.  With luck, the study will recommend the system.

Mid-Week Links: Get a Car

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/37566785 w=620&h=349] There's a major threat to walkable living, transit, biking, and even our highways brewing in the House of Representatives in the form of a terribly written transportation reauthorization bill, HR 7.  Although we know Congresswoman Woolsey is firmly against the plan as written, it's important to keep in mind what is happening on Capitol Hill.

Marin County

• Novato cracked down on unsafe driving this past weekend, resulting in 44 citations.  It's a good move for a city that has seen a number of pedestrian accidents in the past few months. (IJ)
• County planners have approved the Grady Ranch development in Lucas Valley and, unless opponents appeal to the Board of Supervisors, the project will go ahead as planned. (IJ)
• West Marin may help the county satisfy some of its affordable housing requirements by allowing ranches and farms to build workforce and owner housing on-site, cutting down driving commutes into the region. (IJ)
• SMART ceremonially broke ground on its transit system, marking the beginning of real construction and the culmination of years of work. (Patch)
• San Rafael's Ritter Center expansion is on hold pending an appeal by Gerstle Park residents. The expansion would be a medical center housed in a temporary building, though Ritter says they will look for a new when it lease expires in 2015. (IJ)
• West End is apparently a quirky place for the young and hip to shop in San Rafael, not to say that it doesn't have challenges: auto-oriented businesses on the north side of Fourth, the half-dead Yardbirds strip mall, too-wide streets, lack of continuity with downtown, and an anti-development bias keep the neighborhood from really thriving. (Reporter, New Pointer)
• Albert Park and the San Rafael Pacifics are go thanks to a judge's ruling against Gerstle Park opponents of the planned baseball field who had sought to block the team. (IJ)

The Greater Marin

• MTC has rejected political appeals of projects that do not meet its required cost-benefit floor, putting common sense above more narrow local interest. (TransForm)
• Intuition is correct: parking minimums encourage driving, and I think it's high time for Marin to abandon the unscientific minimums posthaste.  (The Atlantic Cities)
• The Americas Cup has downsized its plans for San Francisco and will not renovate Piers 30 and 32 after all thanks to regulatory issues.  Still, the Cup is a great excuse for the City to invest in its waterfront and should be a strong incentive for Sausalito to do the same. (SFist, SPUR)
• Bicyclists like the same routes drivers do, and for the same reasons. I suspect that making it safer for bikers to use main roads would do more for cycling mode share than shunting them onto side roads.  In other words, bike lanes belong just where planners may not want to put them: Sir Francis Drake, Delong, and Fourth Street. (The City Fix)
• Luxury car drivers, take note: you may be driving like a jerk and not even notice it. (SFist)
• In case you missed Smart Growth America's webinar on sustainable communities, they have their materials up for perusal. (SGA)

Walkable Centers, Walkable Stations

If our local transit agencies ever revamp their bus maps or create supplements like my spider map, they should mark important stops as walkable centers, branding them like rail stations even if SMART will never go anywhere near them. Inspired by David Klion's metro station walkability rankings for the DC area I decided to make my own.  I was curious how our various bus pads and transit hubs stack up against one another in part out of curiosity, and in part to see whether major improvements could be made around our town centers and bus pads.  Using Walkscore, I got the following rankings, in order:

1. Santa Rosa Town Center, 98
2. Mill Valley Town Center, 97
3. Fairfax Parkade, 95
4. San Rafael Transit Center, 94
5. Copeland Street, Petaluma, 94
6. Terra Linda Bus Pad, 86
7. Larkspur Town Center, 83
8. San Anselmo Hub, 82
9. Sausalito Ferry, 82
10. Rohnert Park, Town Center, 82
11. Ignacio Bus Pad, 80
12. Cotati Town Center, 80
13. Tiburon Town Center, 78
14. Strawberry Transit Center, 75
15. Novato Transit Center, 75
16. Marin City Transit Center, 75
17. Rowland Avenue Bus Pad, 74
18. Lucas Valley Bus Pad, 74
19. Corte Madera Town Center, 72
20. Civic Center, 72
21. Paradise Drive Bus Pad, 71
22. Larkspur Landing, 71
23. Ross Town Center, 69
24. Delong Bus Pad, 68
25. Lucky Drive Bus Pad, 68
26. Tiburon Wye Bus Pad, 68
27. Canal (Average), 67
28. Seminary Drive Bus Pad, 66
29. College of Marin 63
30. Manzanita Bus Pad, 60
31. N San Pedro Road Bus Pad, 58
32. Spencer Avenue Bus Pad, 55
33. Atherton Bus Pad, 51
34. Alameda del Prado Bus Pad, 34
35. Marinwood Bus Pad, 18
36. Manor, 12

A few things stick out to me.  First, bus pads are far less walkable than town centers, though most of them are walkably close to amenities.  Especially surprising was the Lucas Valley bus pad, which is within walking distance of quite a few commercial outlets.  It is apparently more accessible than bus stops in downtown Ross and Corte Madera.  Second is the high accessibility of older towns and low accessibility of newer areas.  Third is that Marin's development is remarkably walkable compared to that of the DC metro area.  The average score for Marin is just a hair under 71, the same as DC's subway station average of 71, though some of the suburban counties have averages in the 40s. Lastly, there is no stop in Marin with a perfect 100.

One should keep in mind that Walkscore doesn't include the actual pedestrian environment. I'd much rather spend an afternoon in downtown Corte Madera than around the Smith Ranch Road office parks. Rather, Walkscore tells us that the bones of a real, metro-esque system are already in place, and that these neighborhoods, if retrofitted for walkability and served properly by transit, could take off.  It also tells us that development and the bus system have gone hand-in-hand: the various walkable (or at least accessible) centers around the county are served by the bus.

And these are the places that should be branded as transit hubs.  In DC, unlike the Bay Area, metro stations are the centers of a huge amount of development.  Cities market their metro stations as potential downtowns, and conversations about urban planning, office development, and more revolve around transit accessibility.  DC's metro map makes it easy for people to know how to get where they want to go, and businesses can market themselves with ease.  The carless Washingtonian may never get on the bus, but they know how to get where they need to go if it's next to a Metro station.

The same sort of branding and mapping could bring investment to the various gray fields around our bus hubs.  The Hub, for example, has an abandoned construction project not more than 500 feet away.  It's built into the hillside, so a taller building of four stories or more is certainly feasible.  Something similar might be built around Smith Ranch Road on either side of the freeway, while the huge parking lots around downtown Tiburon and Larkspur Landing could be put to far better use than car storage.

Because these centers are already walkable, they could in theory support more transit than is currently in place.  Marin's buses are blessed with walkable areas and mostly simple routes.  They just need that push to succeed.

Mid-Week Links: Not Quite Paradise

Marin

• Traffic along Tiburon's main road is getting worse, but its bus line is one of the least-used routes in the Marin Transit system.  TAM, MT, and the town think improving school-time bus service may do the same trick it did in Fairfax, although they're exploring other options as well. (IJ)
• The historic building that housed Amazing Grace Music, the old instrument shop in the Redhill Avenue median, is gone. The San Anselmo landmark business has moved up the street thanks to George Lucas, who funded the project and lives a block away. (IJ)
• Fairfax has its gateway supermarket back, now that the Good Earth has opened on the east edge of town. The corner has undergone a major transformation over the past few years, and the store looks set to become even more of an anchor for the town. Not to say that everyone's happy - a local merchant dialed 911 to complain about a lack of parking. (Patch)
• Neighbors were up in arms over CVS's plans for a lit sign in Tiburon, but it turns out businesses are already flaunting local regulations. (IJ, Mill Valley Herald)
• MALT's housing-oriented cousin, CLAM, has a new director with an eye towards smart growth and the particular human/nature balance that marks West Marin's villages. (IJ)
• The Marin Board of Supervisors were busy this week dissolving the county redevelopment agency, reallocating funds for road repair, rescinding the priority development zone for homes around San Quentin, and bolstering their rainy day fund. (Patch, IJ)

Bay Area

• The Metropolitan Transportation Commission wants high school interns this summer, and is actually willing to pay them. I'd be all over this were I 18 again. (Patch)
• Parking in San Francisco could get even more expensive if SFMTA extends parking hours to Saturday evenings and Sundays.  That GGT ride just keeps looking more and more attractive. (SFist)
• SMART's rolling stock is on track for a 2013 delivery, and it turns out they're not the only customer.  Toronto will purchase the same vehicles from manufacturer Nippon-Sharryo, and SMART, as a partial designer of the heavy DMUs, is getting a cut of the profits. (Press Democrat)
• Rohnert Park's SMART station has officially been relocated to the city's center, much to the joy of all parties. Rohnert Park plans on building a downtown based around the station. (NBBJ, Press Democrat)

The Greater Marin

• Raleigh, NC, is pushing the envelope when it comes to getting people to walk. But it's not the city doing the push - it's people who care enough about Raleigh to do what needs to be done, and sometimes that's just signage. (BBC)
• Google has been instrumental in bringing transit data into the digital age with its GTFS protocol, allowing people to plan trips using transit instead of just cars.  Golden Gate Transit and Marin Transit are not currently participants, but are actively working on getting online. (Xconomy)
• Nashville has gone for the gold and released a new downtown zoning code that essentially does away with much of the zoning.  No more parking minimums, no more prescribed uses, no more setback requirements. (Old Urbanist)
• Norfolk, VA's The Tide light rail is going like gangbusters, beating ridership expectations in only six months. It faced much the same criticism as SMART, although the two systems will be rather different, and only time will tell how our rail system pans out. (Virginian-Pilot)
• Building good bike infrastructure means more than painting sharrows, as Marin loves to do, and sometimes it means giving bicyclists their own traffic signal. (SanFranciscoize)

Leaving ABAG Would Be a Mistake

Over the last year, rage against the Bay Area's alphabet soup of regional authorities has simmered just below the surface of Marin politics.  Although the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) got its share of hate for banning fires over Christmas and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) caught flack for housing mandates around SMART, it was the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) and its Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) process that drew the most fire by forcing localities to zone for more housing.  Marinites think their cities are already built out and so were incensed that an unelected agency could tell them to zone for more development.  The frustration has finally boiled over in Corte Madera, and there's a push for the town to leave ABAG.  It would be a mistake if it did.

Background: The State of Local Control

The RHNA process comes once every seven years, driven by a state mandate to accommodate affordable housing within the state's regions.  Sacramento directs regional agencies - ABAG in the Bay Area, SANDAG in San Diego - to assess housing needs in the area and assign a number of housing units regional towns, cities, and counties must zone for.  Marin has had trouble keeping up with the RHNA cycle and only now are the last towns finishing their housing plans.  Unfortunately, they took so long to finish that the next RHNA cycle is about to begin, dropping voters with more homes to zone for just as they figured out how to zone for the last bunch.

This cycle will be different.  ABAG is working with MTC, BAAQMD, and the Bay Coastal Development Commission (BCDC) to develop a regional Sustainable Communities Strategy (SCS), tying housing allocations to transportation, air quality, and water quality.  This unprecedented level of regional coordination means communities will need to work within the still-incomplete SCS or face financial penalties, as the regional agencies control and disburse a great deal of federal and state funds.  After going through a round of grueling negotiations over the last cycle's allocations and angst over the loss of local control, the SCS is just one more thing for local politicians to worry about.

Pulling Out

Into this walked Corte Madera's ABAG representative, Councilwoman Carla Condon.  For months she has argued that the association is trampling local rights, pursuing a social engineering project to make Corte Madera look like Oakland.  Mayor Bob Ravasio concurs, and would rather receive housing allocations directly from Sacramento.

I'm on record against these allocations - they distort the housing market and do rob cities of local control.  Yet I also know these allocations can do a great deal of good.  The densities mandated are not excessively high, and are met or exceeded in many parts of Marin, and they can give municipal councils an excuse to add housing near transit and historic downtowns.

Withdrawing from ABAG, as Corte Madera is considering, would not change either of those realities.  By dealing directly with the state, Corte Madera would be setting itself up to deal with a bigger bureaucracy with less chance of coming out on top.  As well, pulling out of ABAG could create a logistical mess for Corte Madera at other regional agencies, as transportation funding and support will be tied to the RHNA process, making even more work for town staff to sort out the inconsistencies with every other government in the region.

Far better would be for Corte Madera to spearhead a Marin County housing subregion.  ABAG allows localities to create subregions that can assign their own affordable housing needs.  Although ABAG still gives the subregion a total number of units, the subregion can assign those units however it likes.  A hypothetical Marin subregion would reestablish a modicum of local control over the allocations, allowing amenable cities, like Mill Valley or San Rafael, to take more units while others, like Corte Madera or Novato, would receive fewer.  Allocation would happen through the Marin County Council of Mayors and Councilmembers, so all localities would have a say in how allocations are made.

Alas, such a subregion would apply not to this coming RHNA cycle but the next, as the deadline for subregional formation passed last March.  As well, it's unlikely Corte Madera would be able to pull out of ABAG for this coming cycle either, meaning any reform will need to come from within ABAG or be in preparation for the rather distant future.  Given the major bureaucratic reforms coming with One Bay Area, it's too soon to say if the regional agencies will be too difficult for Marinites to handle.  In the interim, Councilwoman Condon should focus more on shaping the final RHNA numbers to Corte Madera's liking than trying to pull the city out of the ABAG altogether.

Mid-Week Links: Back to the Future

Thanks to some filename snafus, you may have missed my San Anselmo Spider Map, which you can now grab here without hassle.

Got a tip?  Email me at thegreatermarin [at] gmail.com. Link round-ups are hard work, and I can't read everything.

Marin

• Last week, Mill Valley kicked off its general plan update, Mill Valley 2040.  The next year will consist of brainstorming by three committees on community vitality, land use and mobility, and natural environment, as well as input from the general public. It's the first update since 1989. (Mill Valley Herald)
• Wincup's developers will donate $250,000 to Corte Madera's traffic fund to mitigate negative traffic impacts of its development.  Staff have yet to identify a use for the funds. (IJ)
• A Sausalito entrepreneur has plans to start a shuttle for bike-renting tourists who find themselves semi-stranded in Marin after biking over the Bridge.  Sadly, the service will avoid bus routes, disconnecting the system from existing mobility options. (Marinscope)
• The Good Earth opens in Fairfax today at 10:30am in its new location. The store marks a new beginning for that corner of town, removing a major downtown blight. (IJ)
• Ugly, noisy, crowded, and a foot in the door: these are what opponents are calling Lucasfilm's Grady Ranch development, a large complex of stages, studios, visitor housing and support infrastructure in Lucas Valley. (ABC)
• Looks like San Quentin will not be a priority development zone after all, as environmental activists hated the idea even though the land is state-owned and won't sell unless the prison closes. (IJ)
• The County Planning Commission has approved a West Marin plan, tightening rules for development on the coast and loosening some ranching restrictions.  A discussion on the subject will be held on March 4 in Point Reyes, followed by a review by the Board of Supervisors. (IJ)
• MALT will get a new executive director for 2013 as Bob Berner, head of the Trust since its inception, is retiring. (Pacific Sun)
• The Ritter Center wants to expand its medical services to an on-site trailer.  The San Rafael Planning Commission heard the proposal last night. (Patch)

The Greater Marin

• Rather than repair the Petaluma River swing bridge, SMART staff want to buy a used drawbridge from Galveston, Texas. The cost would be considerably less, and the bridge is projected to last 80 years. (Press Democrat)
• The House is proposing a roads-only transportation bill, and that's bad news for anyone that cares about moving around - including drivers. (Sacramento Bee)
• Healdsburg is moving ahead with its main street roundabout plan, despite opposition from car-centric businesses and a dearth of redevelopment funding. (Press Democrat)

Bringing the Spider Map Home

The greatest problem with bus lines is that nobody knows where they go.  While light rail or streetcar tracks are not for every route, they do let people visually understand where transit goes.  Buses, however, travel along the same roadways as cars, leaving drivers in the dark as to where they go.  Communicating a route properly is extremely important to pulling back the veil of our transit system, and for showing people how transit is freedom from the car.

To address this problem in at least one corner of Marin, I've designed a draft spider map for the San Anselmo Hub (PDF).  We discussed spider maps previously; in short they are schematics of where buses intersecting a certain point run.  Such diagrams are used most successfully in London where they integrate with Tube stations, although DC has made some forays into this field of late by putting bus line schematics at bus stops and huge Transit Information Displays, or TIDs, in their metro stations.  (If anyone can find me a PDF of those TIDs, I'll be forever grateful.)  The point is to simplify a bus map by pulling out any unnecessary clutter and isolating just the bus routes, showing where riders can go without transferring.  It is, at least to some degree, a map of the freedom available to you from a given point.

My Hub spider map don't show all the stops, as those can change.  Rather, the map shows primary stops that are unlikely to change, such as Marin General Hospital.  The route lines and stop circles are displayed differently depending on levels of service to give riders a clear visual of where they can always go and where they may need to check a schedule.

As people generally don't care what service they use to go from point A to B, I included all possible transfers along with easily-identifiable logos at all stops where applicable.  This is best seen at the San Rafael Transit Center, which has transfers to all over the North Bay. Transfers in San Francisco, such as connections to the Cable Car, may be valuable to families that want to spend a weekday as tourists in the City.  Including such data also helps riders start to build a mental map of transit beyond Marin, adding connection points to knit them all together.  Plus, it provides advertising for the other agencies.  I had  never bothered to take the bus to the Oakland Airport, but now I know I can.  If I want to take a bus to the City of Sonoma, I know I can take the 38S, even if I don't know when.  The regional transit network map is intended to be an aid in that process.

Giving people a destination-based frequency guide shows riders how they could go from A to B.  If I'm in San Anselmo and I want to get to San Rafael, I don't care if it's I take the 23 or the 22.  The two lines complement one another along that corridor, and the frequency table reflects that.  Given space restrictions I did not include a full-fledged timetable, but I'm assuming other signage is nearby.  Timetables will still be necessary, as this map is for outbound trips only; the 22 doesn't always leave from Sausalito and once per weekday winds through Mill Valley on its way north, but never does going south.  These inbound trips are not visualized, and could confuse travelers.

The rest of the design is taken from MTC's TIDs (PDF), which are sadly missing in Marin.  The orange i logo, the headers, the green were added to visually identify this map with those more common maps.  A San Franciscan visiting San Anselmo would instantly recognize the visual vocabulary, knitting together in their mind that the Hub is still part of the regional transit network even if MUNI doesn't run buses there, and a San Anselmoan would feel a similar sense of recognition when leaving the county.

I chose to map the Hub mostly because I know San Anselmo best, but also because of the location's flexibility.  With some modifications it could be adapted for use up and down Ross Valley.  Used in conjunction with broader system maps and timetables, it would be a powerful tool for Marinites.

Since it's a draft, I'd appreciate any comments and criticisms.  You should know that I added a small border around the map, which is why things look a bit more squished inward than they otherwise ought.  If you think it's good enough as it is, feel free to print (and laminate!) a copy and put it at the Hub.  If you do, send me a picture: thegreatermarin [at] gmail.com.  I designed it on tabloid-sized paper, less than half the size of a traditional TID, so you can print it out without much hassle.

What do you think?  What TIDs and maps should come standard at any Marin transit hub?

Mid-Week Links: Two Steps Back

Marin County

• San Rafael, planning as it is for a revitalized Station Area, thought it a good idea to eliminate the crosswalk at Third and Cijos, calling it a danger to pedestrians.  Rather than pedestrians being the ones complaining, it was the motorists.  There has not been a single accident at the Cijos crossing, and the one-way traffic was controlled from the nearby Lincoln intersection.  In place of the crosswalk, there's now a pedestrian barrier.  At least there are crosswalks nearby.  (Pacific Sun)
• Seventy units of affordable housing have been announced for Marinwood at the Marin Market site.  Although near bus pads, the affordable housing site is far from amenities.  Hopefully the developer will be required to improve the crossing over the freeway to the northbound pad. (IJ)
• SMART should buy the Whistlestop building, as the train project will render it useless to the seniors nonprofit. (IJ)
• San Anselmo is considering how to improve its Safe Routes to School Program at a community meeting tonight, and as of press time no decision had been made. Among the proposals are adding sidewalks and crosswalks, adjusting signal timing, and a pedestrian barrier along Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. (Patch)
• The Greenbae Interchange Project and the Wincup development will both proceed roughly as planned, as MacFarlane Developers and TAM have reached an agreement on how to accomodate both projects. (IJ)

The Greater Marin

• If you missed a One Bay Area planning meeting, now's your chance to at least get your opinion in.  The Plan is soliciting online comments, and I encourage you to take the time to make your voice heard. (Sacramento Bee)
• The Golden Gate Bridge has installed speed signs for cyclists on the western sidewalk, although there isn't a speed limit on the bridge for bicyclists. (SF Examiner)
• Doyle Drive's second phase may be delayed because some state and federal funds haven't materialized as expected. (IJ)
• A Santa Rosa school may not open for want of a sidewalk.  The sidewalk was to be built with redevelopment money. (Press Democrat)
• Cotati's ambitious downtown roundabout plan, which stirred up so much controversy, is also in doubt thanks to issues stemming from redevelopment funds. (Press Democrat)
• Sonoma County's roads are absolutely terrible, at least according to a map prepared by the county's Transportation and Public Works Department. Road maintenance is severely underfunded in Sonoma, and some activists are pushing hard for change. In that light, a proposed road maintenance property tax could do the trick. (Press Democrat, Petaluma360)
• Level of Service, or LOS, is an absolutely terrible way to measure how well a city street performs its many duties, as it focuses solely on moving cars - not people - swiftly along. (Streetsblog)

On Narrow Streets

Let’s think of every amazing city you’ve been to, at least the ones that have been amazing for their form and dynamism. Imagine a streetscape, and think about its form. How wide are the streets? How tall are the buildings? Are there a lot of cars, or a lot of pedestrians? Let’s also think of the ideal, the city you always wanted to visit. Venice comes to mind, as do Paris and Jerusalem. Odds are, these cities look a bit like this:

What I love about the streetscapes above is that I get an overwhelming sense of home from them, but I’ve never lived anywhere but the suburbs. Then again, the downtown streetscapes of San Anselmo, Fairfax, and Mill Valley are pretty impressive:

And places are still being built that look like those quaint French villages we pay so much to visit, although these are called slums:

The elements in each of these are very similar: narrow streets, active pedestrian life and slow or no cars. I point this out not to be sentimental but because although this is one extreme, it is the one that is the most healthy, the most economically viable, the most environmentally sustainable. Marinites bemoan our car-centric attitudes and look with a little bit of aloof sadness at the state of obesity in Middle America, but we ought to always be wary of making the same mistakes that led our Middle American fellows to their current sorry state.

We’ve looked at some plans for redeveloping the eastern end of downtown San Rafael, and I suspect the Civic Center plans will be similarly ambitious and potentially transformative. Yet there is so much to get wrong: developers building fortress apartments, city staffers choosing cars over people, focusing on more and more parking rather than things that engage our hearts and make us feel at home, not interlopers in an automobile’s world. I hope instead we take inspiration from the best places in the world, to make Marin the greater place it could be.

Mid-Week Links: Good Times

Local techno/transit geek Eric Fischer wrote a program to approximate travel routes from geotagged Twitter posts, revealing the desire lines of area.  Looks like he forgot Marin is there, but apparently we don't have a whole lot of Twits to track anyway.

Marin

• Glad that's over with: The RepealSMART effort failed to meet its minimum signature requirements and will not be on the next ballot.  This frees SMART to use $171 million it had in escrow, although the effort may return for November. (Press Democrat)
• Then again...: Whistlestop has filed suit against SMART over the loss of its parking spaces and the effective loss of its building.  SMART and San Rafael are reportedly willing to strike a deal to solve the problem, but there are no details yet. (IJ)
• Novato will give up its affordable housing oversight role to Marin Housing Authority, as it cannot afford the administrative costs without redevelopment funds. (IJ)
• Today, Novato will unveil a model of its new downtown offices, which are proceeding despite newly-elected Councilmember Eric Lucan's opposition. (IJ)
• The Marin History Museum has received an anonymous 1 to 1, $50,000 matching gift pledge to restore the Boyd House.  If you care at all about Marin's history, and about San Rafael's old housing stock, this is your time to donate. (IJ)
• The Muir Woods Shuttle, aka the 66 bus, is slated for a fare hike, but the exact details aren't known yet.  A $5 round-trip fare, complete with bus day pass, is the likely outcome. (IJ)
• SMART and California High-Speed Rail are getting their knocks, sometimes deservedly so, but they're nothing new: BART faced similar criticism before it opened, and Marin lost out as a result. (IJ)
• Marin will upgrade its library lobbies into "market places" for its most popular material. I've always figured, though - if Border's died because people treated it like a library with a coffee shop, why not get coffee shops in the libraries? (IJ)
• San Quentin, currently zoned for 1,500 new homes, could get "priority status" in order to deflect ABAG mandates elsewhere in Marin.  It doesn't change the fact that adding 1,500 homes at San Quentin is, to put it mildly, a little daft. (IJ)
• Marin tweaked its zoning rules, adding an exemption from affordable housing requirements for some unincorporated communities, including Strawberry. Other changes were made to permitting and smart growth planning areas. (Pacific Sun)
• Sausalito will include some of their harbor docks as affordable housing in their Draft Housing Element, as live-aboards pay significantly less rent than their land-lubbing fellow Sausalitans. (IJ)

The Greater Marin

• Windsor has approved their downtown station-area plan, although they won't see any train service until after 2015. (Press Democrat)
• The House and Senate are moving forward with their respective Transportation Reauthorization bills.  Activists, including myself,  aren't so keen on the House version. (The Hill, Streetsblog)
• Nationally, the number of renters has grown significantly, while the number of homeowners has declined, meaning cities are likely well-equipped for the demand.  (Atlantic Cities)
• The BART extension to Livermore is giving voice to an existential question facing the system: should it expand ever outward, or should it keep what it already has?
• Mountain View rejected bus rapid transit because it would have taken up left-turn lanes.  This is a step back for the city's efforts to put moving people, not cars, first.

And...: A beautiful new subway in Kazakhstan. (Architizer)... One Bay Area falls flat in San Ramon, too. (San Ramon Express)... Stockton Street survived just fine without any parking for a week. (Streetsblog)

The SMART Area, Part 4: Buses, and the Future

Over the last few days I've been posting my impressions and comments regarding the San Rafael SMART Station Area Plan. It’s such a large, complicated, and potentially game-changing document that it needed more than just a single post. So far, we’ve covered land use and parking, and mobility, and this last post will cover buses the future of the site.

The hero of mobility in the Station Area Plan will not be SMART; it will be Golden Gate Transit. If a Sonoman wants to get to San Anselmo, she will likely go by bus. If a new resident in the Area Plan wants to go to San Francisco, he will go by bus. And if a Corte Maderan needs to get to Santa Rosa, she'll probably take a bus first. Yet, the bus system, as it stands, is widely lamented as inadequate, especially on weekends. How to improve long-range (beyond 2 miles) mobility for residents in and through the area, and how to accommodate the increased service in the study area, should certainly be part of the conversation.

The typical Marin bus route runs every 30 to 60 minutes and is far slower than driving an equivalent distance thanks to a few crazy loops, some too-compact stop densities, lack of signal priority, long stop layovers, and the general restrictions of running on surface streets in traffic. Although there is an effective and complicated transfer system, thanks to a 95% on-time rate, the bus as it currently stands is not a car-replacing transit system.

This bodes ill for transit-oriented development in the Plan Area, not to mention other towns that want to orient their ABAG zoning towards transit – essentially the whole of Marin except for Novato. Without an adequate framework, increased population will lead to more sprawl, meaning more traffic, more pollution, and less open space. We must make the bus work.

There's a debate in the activist community regarding how exactly to do that, but it comes down to a few priorities: improve the absolute quality of the bus service through frequency, improve the relative quality of the bus service by making cars a less attractive choice, and improve the efficiency of rider collection by putting residents and jobs near the stations. In the ideal this means bus rapid transit or just separated lanes, but in Marin's medium-term, such BRT lines on the old rail rights-of-way are probably politically infeasible, and auto mode share would likely remain too great to support the service. Express buses, however, make perfect sense.

Whenever I ride GGT, I hardly see any on-and-off boarding between major stations; people are going from center to center, and ridership is not evenly distributed along the route. GGT should acknowledge this and operate a high-frequency town-to-town express network. GGT's last semi-comprehensive system analysis showed that such express service, combined with developing a system of “green hub” transfer points, would benefit a huge number of riders. If marketed with SMART – a rubber-tire rail – GGT could have a success and draw riders out of the new developments along the SMART corridor.

To boost ridership more generally, GGT should mail every adult within a half-mile radius of the Transit Center a pre-loaded Clipper card with a year-long GGT unlimited ride pass, perhaps in conjunction with the proposed Zipcar membership. San Rafael should allow local businesses to cash-out of some parking requirements by purchasing annual transit passes for their employees. Boulder did something similar to these proposals and saw drive-alone rates drop from 56% to 36%, with the bus taking up the slack. Give people something of value, and they will respond.

The Area Plan makes no mention of improving overall bus capacity or promoting ridership, but it does make some recommendations on how to move the Bettini Transit Center to the SMART site. None of the proposals struck me as particularly attractive, as most of them involve transforming the blocks around the SMART station into rather pedestrian-unfriendly surface stations akin to the Bettini Transit Center today. Other proposals, such as putting bus bays along Heatherton and under the freeway are more attractive from a pedestrian perspective but offer limited capacity.

If San Rafael decides it needs a new parking garage west of 101, the bus terminal should be located to the ground level, giving riders a more weatherproofed facility and allowing the height above the terminal to be used effectively. Bettini's lack of developability is one of the major arguments in the Area Plan for its demolition, so the city should try to lump its desired but ugly infrastructure together. Using the example diagrams from the Area Plan, such a garage would likely provide between 10 and 20 bus bays, depending on the configuration and location of the garage.

The Future

SMART is coming to town, whether people want it or not, and with it will hopefully be a new neighborhood and a new swagger for San Rafael. The city has a chance to come to the forefront of urban policy in the North Bay through innovative (for Marin) land use practices like form-based zoning, parking minimum reform, and true transit-oriented development. Until now, these have simply been words in general plans and housing elements, but San Rafael may actually make it happen. The opportunities here should excite everyone who supports a more walkable, livable, and sustainable Marin.

That's not to say there aren't challenges. Parts of the city staff have a history of choosing car capacity over pedestrian-friendliness, and powerful organizations such as the San Rafael Neighborhood Association could still throw their weight against passage. Both impulses should be resisted by the Council. The opportunities are too great to let this plan slip by.

The Citizens Advisory Committee is meeting on February 2 at 7pm in San Rafael's Community Development Conference Room. The draft plan will go before the City Council some time in March. The Greater Marin will likely be back to its regularly scheduled programming Wednesday.

The SMART Area, Part 3: Mobility

Over the next few days I’ll be posting my impressions and comments regarding the San Rafael SMART Station Area Plan. It’s such a large, complicated, and potentially game-changing document that it needs more than just a single post. Today we tackle the interplay of cars, bikes, and pedestrians. So far, we’ve covered land use and parking, and the last post will cover buses and the future of the site.

The SMART Downtown Station Area is set in a car-centric environment, complete with an elevated freeway and its ramps, pedestrian barriers, dead street frontage, narrow sidewalks, and open lots. There is no traffic calming, little in the way of bicycle infrastructure, and a push to move more and more cars through. This is a transit-oriented development, deliberately focused around means of getting around that don’t include a car. While it does not address needed bus improvements, the Station Area Plan tackles the other issues by building needed infrastructure for walking and cycling. It takes a step back by altering the street network to accommodate more traffic, giving one San Rafael Planning Commissioner “heartburn”, but overall the plan is solid where it chooses to look.

Cars

Highway 101, built as an upgrade to the old Redwood Highway to speed cars to the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco, bisects San Rafael. Irving and Heatherton are functionally the frontage roads, one-way strips running north and south respectively, and Second and Third are the on and off ramps, running one-way east and west respectively. This poses immense problems for active living, as a glorified freeway ramp is no place to put a pedestrian or a bicycle.

Car lanes are 12 feet wide, as wide as a freeway lane, but facilitating speed. Timed lights to keep traffic moving and encourages driving at the speed limit but contributes to noise and the perception of danger. There are no traffic-calming measures that I can think of.

For a transit-oriented community this is problematic, but it is understandable given the geography. In most other cities, traffic is funnelled through specific arterials on a wide grid, though if there is a problem on one street, others nearby can soak up the spillover. San Rafael is the primary freeway entrance for Ross Valley, and the whole of downtown is only five blocks wide. Speeding 24,000 cars per day on and off the freeway is a huge challenge for San Rafael, and this is a way to address the problem.

With more density coming to this area, the Area Plan has proposed adding right-turn lanes off Heatherton to Third, increasing the outbound capacity and allowing the roads to keep flowing freely. Unfortunately, the plan proposes doing this while removing a crosswalk along Heatherton to prevent pedestrians from interfering with traffic flow. This is foolish in the extreme, despite the improved bus travel times. Most traffic through this area is pass-through, and there is more than enough capacity on Mission, Fifth, and Fourth to absorb the increase in westbound traffic from these projects. San Rafael needs to focus on calming Second and Third rather than simply pushing more cars through, especially here.

Bicycling

I remember reading a blog comment once to the effect of, “I’ve been car-free in Fairfax for years, but only because I have a bike.” Golden Gate Transit has somewhat thin service for being a car replacement so bicycle ownership is a must for the car-free, and this is almost as true in San Rafael as it is in Fairfax.

Improving the bike-unfriendly areas around San Rafael, especially under the freeway and along Second and Third, are absolutely essential to allow car-free travel around Marin, and the bike lanes included in the plan accomplish at least a bit by facilitating the bicycle connection between Irwin and the multi-use path behind the San Rafael Corporate Center. MCBC has called for a Class I bike lane (or multi-use path, what the rest of the country calls a cycletrack) on West Tamalpais instead of the planned bike lane on East Tamalpais. This is another good idea to be explored, as cycletracks would go a long way to promoting bicycling in all parts of Central Marin, and a good one on West Tamalpais could be a model.

Pedestrians

Walkability is the foundation of a livable neighborhood, a fact acknowledged by the Area Plan. Walking around the Transit Center is a pain, with missing crosswalks, long curb-cuts, and pedestrian barriers at key intersections. Walking under the freeway is unpleasant, especially at night, and the narrow sidewalks put the cars far too close to pedestrians. To solve this, the Area Plan calls for more crosswalks, removal of extraneous curb-cuts, and widening or adding sidewalks throughout the area.

Unfortunately, the most pressing pedestrian problem is handled in an astonishingly ham-fisted sort of way. When SMART arrives, it will be directly across Third from the Transit Center, and there are huge desire lines running between the two facilities. San Rafael, concerned that people would run across Third to catch their bus, wants to erect a pedestrian barrier along most of the length the station's Third Street side, forcing pedestrians to cross at either Heatherton or West Tamalpais, eliminating mid-block crossings from East Tamalpais by commuters desperate to catch their bus. This is the opposite of pedestrian-friendly.

A far better solution would be to initiate a block-long crossing, starting 30 seconds after a train pulls up and lasting 45 seconds, during which time cars would be unable to turn right. As SMART will run only once every half-hour, it would not be too disruptive of bus and car traffic, and Heatherton traffic would still be able to move south during the crossing. To prevent commuter desperation, buses should be instructed to wait a short time after the train arrives, and SMART itself should have real-time departure information displayed in the train for buses at whatever its next stop is.

Overall, the mobility issues addressed by the Station Area Plan are quite large and are handled competently.  Beyond the bizarre pedestrian barrier, removed crosswalk, and new right-turn lane at Third and Heatherton, walkability and bikeability are improved dramatically under this plan.  In our fourth and final installment, we'll tackle buses and the future of the area.

The SMART Area, Part 2: All Those Cars

Over the next few days I’ll be posting my impressions and comments regarding the San Rafael SMART Station Area Plan. It’s such a large, complicated, and potentially game-changing document that it needs more than just a single post. Today we tackle parking. Subsequent posts will examine mobility, and the future of the area. So far, we've covered land use. With all these homes, all this retail, and all these commuters, parking could turn terrible without mitigation.  Although the transit options will be the richest of anywhere in Marin, the rest of Marin will likely remain just as transit-poor as it is today, so the Advisory Committee explored ways to deal with incoming traffic and where to put all the cars.

Overview

As you probably can guess, I’m not one in favor of parking.  You could call me a Shoupite, I suppose: parking has its place, but it should not be required, and where there is a shortage of parking it should be priced until there is no longer a shortage.  For regular drivers, this ensures they will always have a space roughly where they need it, mitigating the need for circling.  For commuters, it means the commuter lot won't fill up by some God-forsaken hour.  For cities, it means new revenue to plow into their neighborhoods and transit systems.

Excluding the 68 spaces that will be removed after SMART rolls into town, there are 144 metered on-street parking spaces (56 removed by SMART) in the Area Plan's study area that hit 50% occupancy at peak usage and 395 off-street, free all-day spaces (12 removed by SMART) that hit 90% occupancy by 11am.  This puts the total demand for off-street parking at for on-street parking at 100 and total demand for all-day parking at 389 spaces.  It's that second one that's awfully tight, and likely why there is overflow.

This poses a parking problem: how can the city accommodate new residences, retail, and offices while providing sufficient parking for new commuters and new shoppers without wrecking the transit-orientation of the area?  The Area Plan believes it can be done by adding more parking, including the area within the downtown shared parking district, and through demand mitigation.

More Parking!

Click to enlarge. Red are parking lots & garages

I'm not entirely convinced there's a need for more parking given the huge number of lots - over 110 by my count - within a half-mile radius of the station.  Much of this is probably due to parking minimums imposed by zoning regulations, but there is still a plethora of parking.  I'd wager that around half the buildable space south of Mission is taken up by parking.  Look especially at the north side of Third Street!  It's just a long line of parking garages.  Little wonder nobody says, "Oo, let's check out that cool place on Third Street!"

As well, with over 90% occupancy of lots that are free, it would seems sensible to me to simply start charging for parking at the various commuter lots, and encourage owners of private parking to open it up to the public, or provide a mechanism for developers to purchase shared parking from those with a surplus, diminishing their own requirements.  As for spillover areas, setting up parking meters with a residential parking permit system should ensure commuters don't park in residential areas, while the city could allow  enterprising residents to rent out their driveways for the day.

Alas, the politics and mechanics of parking are a bit more complicated.  Everybody wants free parking right in front of their destination.  Downtown Tiburon, for example, is often accused of having no parking, but when the city actually looked they found scores of spots, just a little off the beaten path.  As well, with luck, San Rafael's surface parking supply will continue to decrease.  Pricing the parking supply implies that there are competitors to parking, such as transit, cycling and walking, but those are the topic of our next installment.  Decreasing supply implies the same.  The Area Plan takes non-car mobility seriously, but also suggests additional parking, as well as demand mitigation through car sharing.

More Parking, Less Demand

Car sharing is absent in Marin, mostly because our low-density cities and towns can’t support it, but studies have shown it dramatically reduces the need for parking. A single car share vehicle removes 14 cars from the road. The plan suggests allowing developers to forgo some parking if they support on-site car sharing. This is an excellent idea, as the more flexibility a developer has in its parking, the better the city will be. Still, I’d go one step further. As part of the car sharing rollout, San Rafael should give every household within walking distance of the redevelopment area free membership for a year, which would cost a pittance at around $184,000. Marinites are unfamiliar with car sharing, and this could serve to get people out of their cars and onto the sidewalks.

Even with demand minimized, this is still a transit-unfriendly county, and parking will be needed for residents, commuters, and customers.  To keep the burden off the developers, the Area Plan recommends including the area in the downtown shared parking zone, which allows retailers to count spaces in parking garages against their parking minimums, and building another parking garage along Third.

I would hate to see San Rafael add yet another garage onto Third, especially in the middle of an important walking area and so close to other parking garages and lots.  If a garage is really deemed necessary, a better location would be east of the freeway and extending the shared parking zone out to San Rafael High School and Unity Street.  Montecito Shopping Center is overflowing with cars, and they'd probably like having a bit more breathing room.  Besides, the newly tall buildings along Irving will want good access to a garage if they are to be built with less parking than normal.

I'd recommend extending the parking zone to residences as well.  With on-street parking at only 50%, some demand for off-street retail parking could be absorbed by the street, freeing up space in the garages and lots for residents to store their cars.

Parking will be seen as a problem anywhere one goes outside of the mall, but properly managing it will make the place actually attractive rather than just giant parking lots and garages.  Through demand mitigation (carsharing, transit, bicycling), innovative policies to broaden the parking supply, and parking pricing, San Rafael should be able to manage the influx of people to the area.  If parking will truly be a problem, a garage east of the freeway will open up that area for business and support the high-density development planned along Irwin.

Generally, a car is anathema to transit-oriented living, but there's little transit to orient around.  It is difficult to balance the needs of a transit-poor community with the needs of its transit system, but the problem of parking will remain a very real one for the area.  I hope the city will strike that balance - managing demand and providing mobility without encouraging car usage.

The SMART Area, Part 1: Land Use

Over the next few days I’ll be posting my impressions and comments regarding the San Rafael SMART Station Area Plan.  It’s such a large, complicated, and potentially game-changing document that it needs more than just a single post.  Today we tackle land use.  Subsequent posts will examine parking, mobility, and the future of the area.

San Rafael has released its draft downtown SMART Station Area Plan, and I must say that I’m excited.  So many good policies are wrapped into this – reducing parking requirements, form-based zoning, traffic calming, street engagement – that it has the potential to change the face of San Rafael and Marin by showing what can be accomplished with sensible zoning and real walkability.  While not a 180-degree turn in local planning practices, it’s pushing that direction.  If comments from the Planning Commission are any indication, there’s a hunger to go all the way, and that can only mean good things.

If you’re just joining us

San Rafael’s Station Area Plans cover the immediate areas around the upcoming Civic Center (for another post) and downtown SMART stations.  The downtown station will be located at the current site of Whistlestop Wheels and will be the terminus for the system’s Initial Operating Segment (IOS), which will extend north to Guerneville Road in Santa Rosa, roughly 37 miles away.

To prepare for the incoming train, San Rafael convened the Advisory Committee, consisting of representatives from San Rafael; the San Rafael Redevelopment Agency; SMART; the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District (GGB), which operates GGT; Marin County; Marin Transit; and the Transportation Authority of Marin.  Their mission: to create the first real transit-oriented, mixed-use communities in Marin since the end of the Northwest Pacific Railroad in 1941.

This location is almost antithetical to transit-oriented development, located as it is next to the elevated section of Highway 101 that cuts San Rafael in half.  Second and Third are extremely busy arterials that function as extended freeway ramps, and the area is dominated by parking lots and auto-oriented uses, such as gas stations and body shops.

Almost antithetical, but not quite.  The station neighbors the Bettini Transit Center, which has buses departing frequently to all over the Bay Area and sees thousands of riders per day, and the Fourth Street commercial corridor.  Existing residential neighborhoods have a strong walking component, even under the freeway.  In other words, the neighborhood may be ugly but it is the transit and commercial nexus of the county, and that makes it ripe for redevelopment.

Better zoning

The key to development in this area is fairly basic: make it a place people want to walk around in and stay through safe sidewalks and streets, calm traffic, interesting sights and sounds, and high degrees of connectivity.  This is exactly what the plan advocates.

For land use, the plan recommends increasing height limits along Heatherton to 66 feet, enough for five-story structures, and to raise the limit to 56 feet along Irwin, as well as along Fourth Street to Grand.  Within these zones, the floor-area ratio would be raised to 2.0 and 1.5, respectively, while both areas would see density requirements lifted.  Residential uses would not count towards FAR, while parking minimums would be relaxed, although not eliminated.

I wrote last week about the need for residential development within the core, and the above would aid immensely in this endeavor.  Conceptual plans for the blocks immediately surrounding the station show the possibility of hundreds of new homes.  Given that a household can support 73 square feet of retail, just the example developments would support close to 20,000 square feet of retail.  Given the slack retail market in San Rafael, this will be a major boon to neighboring businesses.  With office development and the centrality of San Rafael to Marin, retail is likely to do extremely well.

The Montecito Neighborhood Association, which represents homeowners along Fifth Street between Irwin and Grand, complained that increasing height along Fourth on their block would overshadow their homes, and I’m inclined to agree.  Really aggressive land-use liberalization could accomplish the same goal of pulling the downtown core across the freeway without increasing heights at all.  Perhaps the city could lift lot coverage maximums, implement a setback maximum, and lift parking requirements while maintaining a two-story height limit.

I hope that the Montecito Neighborhood Association will not come out against larger portions of the plan than just those that would effect their own homes, and so far they have limited their strong opposition to just those recommended changes on the eastern side of the freeway. If they do begin to oppose developments in places that would not effect their homes, San Rafael could have a problem on their hands.

I’m concerned about crowding out the possibility of a second track through town, however.  If the system performs better than anyone expects, it could lead to major problems down the line and severely limit capacity.  I don’t want planning now to put a ceiling on the system if we don’t have to.

In any event, these land use patterns are new and innovative for Marin.  The Planning Commission was strongly in favor of the plan, and some even wished it would go further, instituting parking maximums or abolishing the minimum altogether, but they also felt that San Rafael was not ready for that sort of thing.  This sort of change comes slowly, and the Station Area Plan is the first step.

Monday Links: Go Abroad

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o]
We often imagine that the Dutch were always cyclists.  While that's correct in some sense, the Netherlands faced sprawl and auto-centric development in the 1950s and 1960s, just as the United States did.  Unlike Americans, though, the Netherlands fought back, and the result is the Netherlands we see today.

Marin County

• Corte Madera's abandoned Madera Vista apartment complex will be renovated. They have sat vacant since a 2008 fire. (Twin Cities Times)
• Infill development near freeways should take into account auto pollution and take steps to mitigate it.  This is especially important in Marin, as the SMART corridor runs parallel to 101 for much if its route, and to the One Bay Area process. (California Watch)
• San Anselmo wants to buy Bald Hill, currently in Ross, but nobody knows how to get in touch with the owners.  The hill is owned by Asian Alliance LLC, and the founder and last contact the town had died years ago. (IJ)
• Downtown San Anselmo is undergoing a bit of a shake-up, with a number of storefronts vacant and a Goodwill moving in.  A group wants to convince George Lucas to open a theater in town, but making that happen could be difficult (IJ)
• Sausalito's Housing Element is nearly complete and will be submitted officially to the City Council on January 31.  If approved, it goes to the state on February 2.  (Marinscope)
• Mill Valley wants to update their General Plan, refocusing on transit and traffic-calming.  With sometimes half-hourly buses it stands a better chance than some areas, but hopefully it will work with Marin Transit and GGT to enhance transit options. (Mill Valley Herald)
• Larkspur Landing might get $2 parking after all, given a tepid Board response to a premium-space idea. This will help manage demand a bit at the terminal, which tends to fill up early. (IJ)
• West Marin's open space portfolio will soon increase by 22 acres after a successful fundraising drive. (IJ)
• San Rafael's red light program will be studied to assess its impacts on driver behavior, including rolling right turns, which can be unsafe to pedestrians. (IJ)
• A 90-year-old driver struck and killed a pedestrian at Second and G in San Rafael.  The exact circumstances are unknown. (IJ)

The Greater Marin

• Looks like downtown living really is good for you.  Residents of areas with a high density of businesses walk three times as much as others, but the areas need to draw in non-residents to succeed. (Atlantic Cities)
  
• San Francisco's SFPark project is dramatically increasing hourly revenue on its meters.  The project gives drivers the option of paying by credit card, phone, or cash, which is useful for the large hourly charges in popular locations. (SF Examiner)
• California's ability to establish cycletracks, bikeways, and other proven bike facilities is stymied by too-conservative design guidebooks that call these "experimental" facilities.  Sadly, AB 819, which would change that, is slowly being gutted. (Streetsblog)
• The American Public Transit Association (APTA) has published a rundown of how to talk to opponents of high-speed rail projects with a new report of common criticisms and appropriate responses. (Streetsblog)
• Head of the California High Speed Rail Authority has stepped down, as has the chairman of its board, citing personal reasons. (Sacramento Bee)
• Caracas has a gigantic, abandoned office tower in its center, and some entrepreneurial folk have set up their own town inside. The best part, they say, is having so much transit access in the middle of the city. (Foreign Policy)
• It's estimated we've paved about 3,590 square miles for parking, about 2 spaces for every man, woman, and child in the United States, and it's time to take them seriously not just as blight, but as public space. (NY Times)

Mid-Week Links: The Right Kind of Parking

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/34514767 w=620&h=349] So people sometimes think I'm a geek; I bore them to death with talk about LOS and bike lanes and units per acre, but when so much can be done with just bike parking I can hardly shut up.  Marin, despite its cycling culture, has very little bicycle parking in its downtown cores.  Replacing one car space every other block with bike parking in downtown San Rafael, for example, would add 50 bicycle parking spaces for only 5 car spaces.  As well, putting the bikes where drivers need good sight lines would make the program even better.

The North Bay

SMART construction has officially begun!  For the moment it's just survey teams and a sign, but the $103 million contract has sparked the first construction work of the project.  Construction will be from Santa Rosa's Jenning's Road station, added back in during contract negotiations and now relocated to Guerneville Road, to the Civic Center.  Meanwhile, RepealSMART is turning to paid signature-gatherers to qualify for what they claim is the qualifying target: 14,902. They've acknowledged they wouldn't be able to meet either of the two higher proposed numbers: 30,000 or 39,000. (Press Democrat, IJ, Business Journal, Watch Sonoma County)

• Tea party protesters interrupted a One Bay Area public planning meeting in Santa Rosa.  I hope Marin's meeting will be more civil. (Press Democrat)
• There is a problem with the Wincup development in Corte Madera.  Apparently the parking garage is going where a new freeway ramp - part of the Greenbae Interchange Project - is supposed to go, and TAM isn't happy. (Pacific Sun)
• Larkspur has a pedestrian bridge design. (Patch)
• BioMarin is expanding to the San Rafael Corporate Center, lowering the city's office vacancy rate from 40% to 12%. While office employees only support 4 square feet of retail, it is a chance to build more street life in eastern downtown. (Patch)
• The Novato pot club has done what the Fairfax club could not: survive. Although neighbors and city and federal officials want to shut down the club, owners are soldiering on after winning an eviction suit from their landlord, who complained there was marijuana smoking on the premises. (IJ)
• The driver of an Aston Martin caused a four-car crash on Highway 101 after losing control of his vehicle and clipping another driver's car.  The highway closed for 30 minutes. (IJ)
• Larkspur Landing could get parking fees on 160 of its "prime" parking spots for only $65 per month.  GGT is mulling the move to help close the Bridge District's 5-year, $87 million deficit, although the program would only amount to $625,000 over that time frame. (IJ)
• A cyclist severely injured himself on Alexander Avenue on Wednesday when he lost control of his bike and crashed into a guardrail.  Sausalito wants to redesign Alexander Avenue to make it safer for the many cyclists who use it to get to and from the Golden Gate Bridge. (IJ)
• Terrapin Crossroads lives, and it's heading to the Canal to take over the site of Seafood Peddler. The approval process is expected to be handled administratively, as Seafood Peddler already had most of the appropriate permits. (Pacific Sun, IJ)
• Design and zoning issues could become a political issue in San Anselmo now that Councilman Jeff Kroot is involved in a spat with a neighbor over a planned expansion of Kroot's home. (IJ)
• High-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes are not financially viable on Highway 101 through Marin, according to a TAM study, without upping the carpool requirement to 3 passengers. It's just as well, as HOT lanes would cripple any casual carpooling initiative in the county. (IJ, The Greater Marin)
• Healdsburg wants to fix an old bridge for $12 million, but don't have the money to do it.  Federal officials are skeptical of the plan and appear to prefer replacing the bridge for $25 million. (Press-Democrat)